We’ve been a fan of Plus-Plus building blocks for several years. Ever since I picked up a small box a the National Building Museum giftshop, my son frequently busts out the container and starts building. The innovation of Plus-Plus’s design is that every piece is the same. We’ve gathered different color collections over the years, but we’ve never had building instructions or specific plans in mind. This latest set comes with preselected colors so you can build your favorite farm animals.

We first built the cow. Actually my ten year old son built it himself. He was able to follow the directions and build the cow and found it pretty fun. He had been putting together free-form structures, or doodles, for years. Having a goal of a recognizable organic object, and then doing it within the limitations of Plus-Plus bricks was very rewarding for him. Ok, he’s made Minecraft series creatures before, but the cool thing was that he learned several new combination techniques from these instructions and was inspired to make some more builds.

We also got to test out a completely separate tube, this one is for building a pig. There were enough left-overs my son also put together a piglet. My son particularly liked the technique of putting a piece sideways and interlocking it perpendicular to the face, creating two pupils. He hadn’t thought of that before, but has started incorporating it into his other designs.

Here is his original piece, a flying skull. He put this together quickly after completing the pig. Overall the thinking behind designing an original creation is different than building with LEGO or other construction systems. Because all of the pieces are uniform, you don’t need to go digging for a specific type of connector or shape. We have a decent collection of colors, but the real ingenuity comes from how you put the pieces together.

Here is a wave. There are several different color theme packs you can grab. There are primary colors, neon colors, and some of the blues from this set came from a translucent pack. We first got ours in a museum gift shop, but enjoyed the bigger selection on Amazon. There you can find these farm animal tubes, as well as the unicorn, sea turtle, superhero, and larger color packs. Swing by plus-plus.us for more information.

We purchased Plus-Plus in the past, but the cow and pig sets were provided for the purpose of review.